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In fact, in all of human history, there has been only one genuinely progressive, genuinely liberating idea: a lightning bolt across the pages of history – the why in 1776, the how in 1787 – the idea of limited government, god-given rights, personal liberty and rule by the vast collective wisdom and industry of the common man, and not by the bored, pampered and self-hating elites that have run everything before and since. This is a once-in-history idea. This is why we have to conserve it. We have to conserve this fundamentally liberal idea.

Brilliant! I don’t think it would be possible to sum things up with less words without loosing clarity.

So if that is “It”, what is the opposite?

When a society – after generations of hard work, sacrifice and hardship – reaches a certain level of prosperity, “Progressives” like Bill Maher, Janeane Garofolo, Rosie O’Donnell and Gaius Gracchus – that last Progressive died in 121 BC – assume that the prosperity is endless, and push for more and more people to get more and more goods and services for less and less work. Why? Because – as today, in America, as with the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Ottomans, the Mongols, Rome, Greece, Eqypt, Babylon… They do it for political power. They live for political power. This “Progressivism” is ancient, recurring, tyrannical and ruinous.

And we voted for it. Just like the Romans did.

It is not just the opposite of “It”. The opposite is the norm course of events.

And so they asked themselves: if the vanguard of the revolution wasn’t going to be the worker, then who would it be? And the answer they came up with was: the dispossessed.

The Neo-Marxist revolution would not attack the capitalist economy – that was too successful. The target of the new Marxist revolution would be the Culture.

Marxist philosophers like Antonia Gramsci, and later, Saul Alinski – personal hero to such present-day fellow travelers as Chris Matthews, Hillary Clinton and, of course, The President of the United States – started to create narratives – stories – about America. This rapidly evolved into a philosophy called “Critical Theory” and the idea of Critical Theory was to attack the dominant culture – that would be us – from all sides, simultaneously.

[…]

The objectives of the Frankfurt School, of Gramsci and Alinski in their assault on the culture, were laid out in detail and were very clear: Eliminate not only the voice, but the very idea of reason. Destroy history. Delegitimize shared morality. Medicate instead of discipline children. Promote the idea that problems are so complex that only elitists, experts and academics can discuss, let alone solve them. A later pair of American Marxist philosophers developed what became known as the Cloward-Piven strategy: overwhelm America’s social systems – welfare, health care, immigration, etc. by telling people they were owed things, and by intentionally overwhelming them, cause them to collapse – leaving nothing but smoking wreckage, and no where to turn but to the government.

This is certainly “Secret War” or “War of Hidden Movements”. Most of us don’t even know it is going on. Whittle calls even says:

we are in an information war, a battle of narratives…We are, together, soldiers in this narrative war for America and for civilization

We need to ram the iceberg. We need to hit it head-on. We need to put in all the power we have – all of the power – and go right at the heart of that monster. Because everyone talks about what the iceberg did to Titanic, but no one talks about what Titanic did to the iceberg.

That sounds like degrading the 5GW into a 4GW. Maybe.

Any Specifics?

We, for the first time in human history, have an example of what a free society looks like. We, for the first time in history, are children of the only real progressives in all of human history. And we, for the first time in history, have the technology that allows common people to talk to each other, to encourage and inform each other, and to make an end run around the suicidal elites and their suicidal, dying media organs.

Is that it? I think (and it sounds right to me) he is suggesting every meme/false-story/false-narrative on the must be challenged whether it it is in public or in our institutions with four intermediate ends in mind:

[…]that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

What is productivity? Simply getting more output from the same or less input. Dahl showed in his talk the institutional context in which productivity improvement flourishes. His findings will gladden the heart of any libertarian, and anyone else who wants a prosperous future for the billions of people on this planet who are mired in poverty. He began by asking why South Asians and Cubans are more productive outside of India and Cuba? Why do Russians have the highest per capita income of any ethnic group in the U.S., but very low per capita income in Russia? Why are Mexicans five times more productive in the U.S. than in Mexico?

The answer is that productivity flourishes when people are free, safe, and justly treated. Dahl calls this the framework for prosperity. “This principle holds not only for nations, but for any organization or institution that seeks to unleash its potential to achieve improvement and growth,” declared Dahl.

The result is a civilization in the “process of committing suicide”, whose dominant ideology is anti-anti-barbarism, where the highest value is not to oppose even the greatest evil.
[…]
Terror, if it is anything, represents the ultimate challenge of barbarism against civilization. And if the great centers of Western learning, the giant flagships of its literacy as represented by newspapers, magazines and television stations cannot rouse themselves to oppose terrorism then in some fundamental sense it has already pre-surrendered. And this ethos of surrender, this “anti-anti-barbarism” will inevitably manifest itself in all facts of public life; a life which has been converted into a moral vacuum. Polygamy, endogamy, special dispensations for cults, the inordinate fear of giving offensive; these endless and futile accomodations to maintain a void which is rapidly being filled not by the same indefinite vapor, but is instead being occupied by a very definite point of view. A point of view that stipulates when one must wash, pray or what one should eat; that knows even the genders of vegetables. When the moral relativists cast the truth table from their ivory towers they forgot that anti-anti-bararism = ~~(~p)=~p, where p stands for civilization. It is in a word barbarism.

It is this sort of thing that makes me scared for the survival of America as Idea and America as Nation/State.

Another term for this anti-anti-barbarism is post-modernism. Balch defines post-modernism as, “the belief that people can have whatever ethics they like, an ‘anything goes’ attitude.”
[…]
I asked Maimon Schwarzchild what he thought of this post-modernist theme on campuses. He wrote me back, “I must say, my own sense is of civilization committing suicide.”

That article notes a grass-roots response by students to post-modernism:

Post-Modernism meets its match, More God. Our students aren’t so easily manipulated to vacuity as many professors might preach. Their “god”, like those similar false ones that came before, fails to meet mankind’s sense or needs.

In my view, there are three foundations that together distinguish the Kling school from other approaches to economics and political economy.

1. Economics should be subsumed under the general study of human behavior, not the other way around.

2. What matters most for economic performance is firms entering and leaving the market. Free entry and exit produces economic growth over time, which is more important than the allocation of resources at any given point in time.

As was the case in the 1930s, when Czechoslovakia was sacrificed in the interest of peace under the Munich Agreement — a move that ultimately did nothing to prevent World War II — Europeans today also believe that an adversary, seemingly invincible due to a preference for death over life, can be mollified by good behavior, concessions and submission. All the Europeans can hope to gain in this asymmetric conflict is a temporary reprieve, a honeymoon period that could last 10, 20, or maybe even 50 years. Anyone on death row breathes a sigh of relief when his execution is postponed to some indefinite time in the future.”
it.

The Appeasement Theory of War states that war is caused by one side in a conflict appeasing (signaling weakness, submission, lack or resolve, or lack of interest) causing the other side to keep pushing until an invisible line to be crossed thus causing war to break out. The aggressive side is usually surprised when this happens because of the signals sent out by their opponent. The Appeasement theory of War suggest that to avoid war, one must act decisively to threat, and that an actor’s threat (a fuzzy calculation of other’s perception of one’s power and other’s perception of one’s willingness to use that power) must be accurately signaled to all other actors.

I am a US Citizen living in Milwaukee WI. I have interests in IT, information security, CyberWar, national security, fifth generation warfare (5GW), history, public policy, entrepreneurship, economics, pop culture and the future.